Intifada Means War: As Facebook Becomes Tool of Terrorism, What in the World is Mark Zuckerberg Thinking?

Just one month after its launch, the new Facebook page “Third Palestinian Intifada” already boasts over 330,000 members. These members are sharing video and quotes inspiring violence against Israelis and Jews, and its numbers are growing exponentially. One month into the existence of the page, Facebook is silent about the incitement for violence that it is advocating. They insist that while individual posts may advocate violence, the group as a whole does not.

According to Ynet, the creators of the “Third Palestinian Intifada” page got the inspiration to use Facebook as an information gathering point from the Egyptian and Tunisians protestors. Throughout the Middle East, reformers have been using Facebook as an online meeting place to share ideas and information, a way to communicate with one another and organize protests.

The Palestinians that started this group aren’t working toward positive change for themselves or their countrymen. They are working to organize in order to begin a third wave of terror on civilians throughout Israel. They are not working to bring democracy or peace to their citizens, but instead working on bringing death upon others.

Another question to ask is: Has the intifada already begun? Just in the past few weeks, the Fogel family was brutally murdered in their own home; their 3-month-old baby was decapitated sleeping next to her father, who was also stabbed to death. Rockets are falling from Gaza at such a clip that the Israeli government has begun to deploy the “Iron Dome” missile shield to protect civilians in the South. School was canceled for 150,000 children in the Negev because authorities were afraid a rocket would land in a classroom—or strike young students on their way to school. At a busy bus stop in Jerusalem a bomb was placed in a phone booth, killing a British woman and injuring dozens more. This is what the Facebook group’s creators want to continue, only on a wider scale.

Intifada is not limited to the Middle East but has penetrated the halls of US academia. This is demonstrated by individuals like Hatem Bazian, an Arabic lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley who following the War in Iraq stated that “it’s about time that we have an Intifada in this country that changes fundamentally the political dynamics in here.” There is also Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad, a professor of the History of Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations at Georgetown University, who explained simply that, “Intifada is something that Muslims and Palestinians all approve of. It means ‘just get off my back’.”

No one should doubt that Intifada has violent terroristic goals that have been demonstrated by the level of violence used against Israelis since the first and second Intifadas. As a mechanism that justifies all violence in the name of “resistance,” the Intifada has allowed continued violence, including the latest rampage of killings of innocent Israelis in Itamar and now in Jerusalem.

The intifada page calls for the official launch of the violence to begin on May 15, Nakba Day — the day of “catastrophe” — the day that Israel was founded. Members of the group call on Arabs in Gaza, Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) to take up arms with their brothers in Syria, Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan on all of Israel’s borders. They want to rain rockets down onto Israel’s northern and southern borders, bring violence into the homes of families like the Fogels, and incite protests by the Arab citizens inside Israel.

The Facebook group has received significant press in the Arab media, and the number of its supporters has grown by the thousands every day. JPost reports, “The Facebook page has been picked up on jihadi internet forums and promoted. Earlier this month, an al-Qaeda affiliated forum discussed the page’s creation, and urged members to join it, SITE researchers have found.” After the uprisings in Egypt, one man saw Facebook’s role as so vital to the revolution that he named his daughter after the social networking site. The founders of this group hope that Facebook can play this role in their own revolution.

Many in the Western world cheered the use of social media and its unique position to change the societies of these nations. For Palestinians, using social media to organize is not about working toward building a more peace-loving and democratic society. They are not fighting for equal rights for women, humane treatment of gays, the right to vote for their leaders, or for better living and working conditions. The Palestinians are using social media for what they have always been working toward — the destruction of the state of Israel, its Jews, and nothing else.